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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24137914">With Your Eyes Closed</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Troubadourk/pseuds/Troubadourk'>Troubadourk</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Homestuck</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Minor Character Death, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Swearing, Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 17:46:53</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,018</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24137914</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Troubadourk/pseuds/Troubadourk</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Sir Dave Strider, Knight of Time, Prince of Derse and Certified Coolkid™ has been tasked with apprehending the lowborn criminal Karkat Vantas, and ensuring he is brought to justice.</p><p>This will be easier said than done.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>54</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The troll has stolen your boots.</p><p>It’s <em>stupid</em> hot and dawn was barely an hour ago. You’re seven days from Lotaf, if all goes well, but there will be little progress on such a hot day, you figure. Especially if you don’t have any <em>fucking</em> shoes.</p><p>“Dude, I’m not getting you breakfast ‘til you tell me where my kicks went.” You deadpan, pale feet already starting to prickle uncomfortably in the meager sunlight.</p><p>Karkat just growls at you. He’s already retreated into his hood, eyes hidden behind your spare visor. Even covered so, it’s easy to see how utterly exhausted he is, his young face creased, his grey skin tinted pink and mottled with off-white freckles. He lifts his shackled hands to jut his middle finger in your direction. The yellow nail is crooked.</p><p>“Do you wanna die out here? I need shoes to live, Karkat. My sweet, tender human feet will fall off without them, then we’ll both starve to death in this godforsaken wilderness. Sure, I’ll try to crawl on hands and knees for a ways, all pathetic and dirty like some city beggar that fell into a portal and landed in a mysterious magical forest, but I’ll succumb to exhaustion and we’ll both be fucked.”</p><p>Karkat shrugs. “Sounds good to me, shit-for-brains. I’d starve to death out here a hundred times over if I get the joy of watching you lose your limbs and drag your useless carcass around hopelessly until you die.”</p><p>“Seriously man, where are my boots?”</p><p>Karkat has begun to walk away from you—there is a slight tug in your mind the further he gets, the enchantment that pairs his cuffs and the pendant on your neck is responsible for that—but he stops before it gets painful.</p><p>“It’s not my fault your feeble strut pods can’t handle a little bit of forest floor. Trolls walk around without shoes all the goddamn time, Strider. Because we aren’t whiny little wigglers.”</p><p>You gather up your things—minus your boots, and carefully step closer to your irate prisoner. “Sweet, gimme your shoes then and we’ll get a move on.”</p><p>Karkat sputters. “Fuck you, no way, I am not stepping in a bunch of hoofbeast shit and dead leaves just because <em>you </em>can’t keep up with your—”</p><p>A dark blur slams into Karkat, and your blade is in your hands instantly. You turn, only to find yourself on your back, all the air in your body squeezed painfully out by a huge, furry mass.</p><p>A mouth opens wide, and you manage to block the incoming bite with a leather clad arm, feeling needle-sharp fangs pressing through the armor into your flesh—then the <em>second</em> mouth opens, close to your chest, and—</p><p>The creature roars out in pain and leaps off of you. When you find your feet, you’ve already killed it, your sword jutting up from its neck. The other you, that is. You nod at him.</p><p>“Yo.”</p><p>“Hey. Hop to it, past Dave.”</p><p>You hop to it. Hop back, that is, and do all the shit you’ve already done. Sweet. Now you’re present Dave again.</p><p>What is not sweet is the throb of intensely hot pain that stabs at your head like a million angry bees jabbing their stupid knife-asses into your frontal lobe. Fuck.</p><p>You don’t have to worry for long—Karkat is as stealthy as a goddamn tornado, and you can hear him cursing and yelling nearby.</p><p>“No, <em>no,</em> I’m serious, you have to stop—I’ll explain, just get out of here. <em>Yes</em>, get out of here. <em>Yes</em>, that is a fucking order for god’s sake listen to me for once in your nine lives, Nep.”</p><p>You move closer. You see a shape move up a tree nearby, then you’re quickstepping away as something hurtles to the ground, inches from you. And now you’re squaring off against a 5-foot-tall troll with cat ears. What the fuck.</p><p>“You’re purrty fast for a human!” she says, cheerfully, before frowning. “Where’s Pounce?”</p><p>You just shrug at her. She’s sniffing the air, brows furrowing down, frown deepening. “Did you…did you kill her?” her eyes shine with unshed tears, before she launches herself at you, claws scraping the base of your throat.</p><p>She’s fucking quick, dangerous, and unafraid of playing dirty—at one point, you’ve got your blade poised to strike, and she fucking sinks her teeth into your neck like one of the creatures in Rose’s crappy novels, forcing you back. Eventually, though, you have her pinned, weapons gone, and you’re smart enough not to get into biting distance. You’ve barely had a second to consider what you’re going to do next when Karkat fucking <em>screams</em> at you.</p><p>“STOP. NOW.”</p><p>It’s so weird. Usually when Karkat tells you to do something you feel an unnerving desire to do the opposite, but something about his voice makes you pause. The cat-eared troll has closed her eyes, and dark green tears slide down her cheeks.</p><p>“Please don’t kill her, Dave.”</p><p>You’re dumbfounded yet again. Karkat has never said please. Karkat has never called you Dave. Granted, you captured him only about ten days ago, but still. It feels significant.</p><p>“Please don’t kill her.” He repeats. “She doesn’t—she doesn’t know, she’s just trying to help me. But she’s not involved with any of it. She’s just my friend.”</p><p>“She tried to kill me, dude.” You don’t know why you’re arguing. You don’t want to kill this fucking murderous, adorable troll girl. “She sicced a big two-mouthed cat on me. And gave me an owie on my throat. Shit’s rude.”</p><p>Karkat has moved closer—it’s slow going, because without your command, the shackles are heavy and unwieldy. He shuffles over and kneels beside you both. “Nepeta, apologize for being rude and then get the fuck out of here. I am begging you. Go back home and forget this ever happened. I don’t want anyone getting hurt for my stupid, useless ass. I don’t want any more of my friends to fucking <em>die.</em>”</p><p>His voice breaks on the last word and you wish you were anywhere but here. Back in Lohac, melting to death and avoiding your brother. Back in Derse, miserable and bored and avoiding your sister.</p><p>Nepeta doesn’t say anything. She opens her big yellow eyes and fixes them on you, and you’re pretty sure nobody has ever looked at you with so much hate in your life.</p><p>“I am sorry fur being rude.” She says. “Please do not harm Karkat because of me. Please do not hurt him at all.” Fat, green tears fall faster, and you cautiously slip off of her, watching as she drags an army-green sleeve over her face like a little kid.</p><p>She’s gone without another glance at the two of you, up a tree and away. You watch Karkat warily. He stares forward, his expression unreadable behind your visor.</p><p>“I threw your boots in a river, Strider.” </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Karkat doesn’t talk to you for a whole day after that, not even when you tell him off over and over again for trashing your boots, or complain endlessly about how hard it is to walk with bark strapped to your feet. You’re surprised by how much you don’t like that. </p>
<p>You’ve been…escorting him, now, for almost eight days. On the first day, he’d been silent as the grave. But by the second he was cursing at every branch in his path, calling you every name in the book, and just generally ranting, usually about things you didn’t understand.</p>
<p>It’s not like you’re ever going to win any rounds of the quiet game yourself. Between the two of you there has been a near-constant stream of banter. The hills are alive with the sound of dipshits. But although the dude is a major asshole, you’ve had a pretty good hang going. As far as involuntary, Skaia-mandated transport missions go, which mostly just means he hasn’t directly tried to murder you yet.</p>
<p>Karkat finally speaks to you again when you reach the tiny village of Losaz, where the highway begins. It’s only 10:42 in the morning, and if you’d known you were this close to the place, you wouldn’t have made camp last night. Way to go. You’re not exactly cut out for the wilderness.</p>
<p>Karkat shockingly doesn’t berate you for this. Instead, he asks you for a favor.</p>
<p>“There’s a graveyard here.” He says this like it’s unusual, like he’s talking about a travelling circus act. “I only need a minute or two.”</p>
<p>Your eyebrows drop down beneath your visor. “Not by yourself.”</p>
<p>You see a hint of grey gum as he growls out a response. “No, not by myself. God-for-fucking-bid. Will you go? Only a minute.”</p>
<p>You hold up a finger to indicate a single minute, and Karkat answers with his favorite finger. “Guess you got a one-day limit when it comes to shutting up. But yeah, we can go hang out in the spooky boneyard after I buy some boots.” He looks taken aback by your response, but it’s not like a detour to see a stiff is going to put you way behind schedule, and you need to stock up before taking the highway anyway. You’re a jerk, sure, and Karkat is an enemy of the state or some such, but like, dude. You’re not <em>that</em> much of a dick.</p>
<p>You are technically supposed to limit your time around other trolls, to limit “interference,” but you were told this wasn’t enough of an issue to merit avoiding town altogether. Plus, Karkat never takes off his awful grimy cloak.</p>
<p>You buy some ridiculous troll boots, black leather with little metal studs and blue threading at the toes. Karkat sneers at them like you’ve stepped in dog shit, and you strut ahead of him in response, only to remember you don’t know where the graveyard is. Karkat just walks past you without a word.</p>
<p>It turns out the graveyard is less spooky, and more sad as fuck. There are only about a dozen graves, most of them pieces of polished wood. Karkat heads straight for a marker in the back. You hang back a minute, but the buzz in your noggin, plus the fact that you’re a nosy asshole, urges you forward.</p>
<p>There’s a wooden wheel lodged in the ground with drying flowers threaded through its spokes.</p>
<p>Karkat doesn’t kneel—he stands at the foot of the grave and stares forward, addressing the marker like a general giving orders.</p>
<p>“Tav, I just wanted to tell you you’re a giant useless moron. I got captured, and in a few days I’ll be hanged, if I’m lucky, and I’ll leave behind a legacy of suffering and bullshit. You died for no good fucking reason. You died for nothing.”</p>
<p>You startle and almost step back as Karkat’s eyes start bleeding, thin trails of semi-translucent red sliding from the corner of both to pool in the divot of his chin.</p>
<p>“In case you don’t get it yet, that’s me, Tav. I’m what you died for. I’m <em>nothing</em>.”</p>
<p> </p><hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>You’re antsy and restless at dinner. The full day of silence makes the lack of conversation during your meal unnerving, so you decide to poke the beast.</p>
<p>“What’s up with the ocular bleeding?”</p>
<p>Karkat ignores you in favor of pulling the head off a roasted <em>something</em>, and you snap your eyes back to your own meal. You’d had to buy chicken and potatoes from the market and bribe the cook to make them. Luckily, they’d plucked the chicken this time. The inn only had troll food, otherwise.</p>
<p>You’re suddenly aware of just how far out of your comfort zone you truly are. That thought is bothersome, so you poke again.</p>
<p>“If you hold out your hand and sing, do you get a big gross vulture instead of a little songbird? How do your princess powers work?”</p>
<p>On cue, Karkat drops the bug-thing and glares. “I don’t know what a princess is. I don’t have princess powers.”</p>
<p>Karkat has princess powers. Nearly every morning, a couple deer or a fox or something are curled up near the sleeping troll. In the thick of the forest, butterflies get tangled up in his wild hair. It would be pretty phenomenal, but you’re kind of used to special abilities. Most everyone you know has one, and they’re all more useful than getting accosted by chipmunks, or having frogs gather to watch you bathe in the river, or having a solemn moment ruined by a big, scary ass hawk landing on the grave you're visiting.</p>
<p>“The talonscreecher didn’t come from me, dumbshit. Probably. I don’t know. It’s not any of your business, so just forget it.”</p>
<p>You scoff. “The hell it’s not my business, birds carry disease. And they shit everywhere. They’re like feathery grenades full of poop and salmonella. I need to know ahead of time if you can summon them at will.”</p>
<p>“If I could summon <em>anything</em> at will, I’d have one thousand cheese critters pick the flesh from your bones, then I’d ride the world’s most majestical, muscular, disgustingly sweat-glistened hoofbeast into the sunset while a swarm of winged vermin spelled out ‘fuck you, Dave’ in the sky above me.”</p>
<p>“Where’d it come from, then?” You’re kind of distracted by the imagery Karkat is putting down. Dude is a poet, and you can appreciate that, even if his work typically involves your limbs, intestines and various bodily fluids, and how you will come to lose them.</p>
<p>“The troll in the ground could commune with all manner of beasts. It’s just an echo of his power, or something.”</p>
<p>You let that sit for a minute, and suppress a shudder at the memory of the big, ugly bird interrupting Karkat’s one-sided feelings jam. “Seems more like a bad omen to me.”</p>
<p>“Tavros wouldn’t know a bad omen if it parked itself on his giant horns and dropped a hot load of prophecy right onto the top of his head. It’s nothing.”</p>
<p>“Who is Tavros?”</p>
<p>He’d had to have known that question was coming. He groans like you’ve just told him he’s got to have a tooth pulled. “The dead troll. Who I visited today. Do you need details? Want to know his blood color? Care to learn how he died?”</p>
<p>“Dude, I’m just curious is all. Guy can commune with animals beyond the grave. Shit’s impressive. Was he a warrior or something?”</p>
<p>Karkat’s looking at you like you just said something jaw-droppingly stupid. His jaw even drops a tiny bit at just how stupid you are. He snaps it up again, down again, up, then his face screws up the way it does before he starts ranting.</p>
<p>He doesn’t disappoint. Bronze blood, pain, death, suffering, the intricate, suffocating complexities of the troll hierarchy. It’s a proper lecture, but you don’t know what half of it means, and Karkat’s purposefully vague on the interesting bits. You haven’t learned much beyond “troll society sucks” since day one with him, but he says he’s wasting his breath trying to explain, and you guess that’s true. The guy is a dangerous terrorist or something anyway, so you try to block out any part of his ideology that sounds compelling.</p>
<p>“Wait, you said you had to bust your ass to get him buried here—why?”</p>
<p>“That’s what you got from all that? That’s your takeaway? You want to know what we do with our dead? Of course, you don’t give a shit about what happens to us when we’re still breathing.”</p>
<p>You’re a little pissed off by that, and you get ready to retort, but a gruff voice interrupts. A massive, barrel-chested troll who’d been sitting quietly at the bar is now standing by your table. Karkat retreats into his hood and gives you a desperate look.</p>
<p>“You. I know your voice. Aren’t you the one who came here last Spring?”</p>
<p>Karkat doesn’t answer. You’re looking toward the door, looking to see if another Dave is going to poke his head in and tell you to make a run for it. Your hand is on the hilt of your sword, stashed under your chair.</p>
<p>“Vantas, right?”</p>
<p>The troll stoops down low, then gets on one knee to look into Karkat’s eyes directly. He reaches for his hands, cuffed and greasy from dinner. He touches a finger to one of Karkat’s knuckles.</p>
<p>“I heard you that day, before the subjugglator came. I listened to every word. It was true, all of it. Everything you said was true.”</p>
<p>The big burly troll sighs like thunder and finds his feet. “Everything.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>boring chapter is boring<br/>don't worry next chapter will be exciting again</p>
<p>thank you for giving me supportive comments, i truly appreciate it. hope you're doing okay.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Warnings: lil bit of violence here (including blood); vomiting; description of injury (if you think any other warnings need to be added, please let me know).</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>You wake up before sunrise, groggy, overheated and dry-mouthed. You don’t remember falling asleep—you’d left town before nightfall, unwilling to risk staying after Karkat was recognized. You don’t remember making camp, and you certainly don’t remember falling asleep against a tree trunk.</p><p>Your chest aches, and your left side is tingling. Your arm weighs one hundred pounds when you lift it to feel along your rib cage. No broken bones, it seems. Your breath begins to steady. Focusing, the sounds of the forest filter into your consciousness, and you hear a voice nearby.</p><p>“—disgusting. Please tell me you’re joking with me. It’s bad enough when it’s the usual, but he’s a human. You don’t even know where’s he’s <em>been</em>.” That’s Karkat, you know. He sounds subdued, quieter than usual. You almost jump when you hear the second voice, nearer than you expected.</p><p>“I am being resourceful, dearheart. We are not in any position to be particular.” This voice—female, almost noble sounding—is accompanied by a light step to your right, and you close your eyes, feigning unconsciousness.</p><p>“It’s not being particular, it’s being judicious. We’re not in any position to take risks. Which, by the way, brings me back to my original point—”</p><p>“Hush. He is awake.”</p><p>The voice is right in front of you now. Found out, you drop the ruse and open your eyes to see an imprecise, blurry glow towering before you. Huh.</p><p>“Oh my god, why didn’t you drain him more? He’s going to kill you.”</p><p>“Were you not complaining, only one minute ago, about the barbarism of my methods?” There is a noise, metallic and heavy, and the air hums with magic. But the glow has intensified, and you can’t make anything out—your eyes struggle to adjust and your head is swimming. “It hardly matters. We will just kill him the traditional way and be done with it.”</p><p>You groan as Karkat makes a strangled noise, and you can see the shape of him, blocking out the glowing thing as he steps between you. “Kanaya, how many times do I have to fucking repeat myself? This is not another cluckbeast-shit mercenary. We can’t kill him. The collateral damage is your neck in a noose beside mine, if we’re lucky. It’s unacceptable. The gallows probably isn’t even high enough for the job, honestly, imagine the scandal of a jadeblood—”</p><p>The glowing one—Kanaya, apparently—makes a noise that has every hair on your body standing straight up, shit, you didn’t even know you had hair in some of those places, but there it is, standing up—and your senses sharpen with adrenaline, just in time for the glowing to sputter out, leaving you in the dark.</p><p>“We are not alone here.”</p><p>Damn straight. Took him long enough.</p><p>You don’t get a good glimpse at what happens next—you can feel the urgency of your own need to get back, the loosening of the threads as the timeline wobbles precariously, every second counting down to disaster. But you’re back, and in the thick of that battle near instantaneously, settling into place like clockwork, each step following the other, bringing the rhythm back together again.</p><p>You drop your visor and the greying light of near-dawn is more than enough. No need to think. Just follow the beat.</p><p>
  <em>Tick</em>
</p><p>You block the strike of a weapon the likes of which you’ve never seen, wielded by an equally unusual troll. She snarls at you, revealing elongated canines.  </p><p>
  <em>Tock</em>
</p><p>The weapon has teeth of its own, hundreds of them, spinning around viciously. The sound rips apart the calm of the morning, jarring and unreal. Sparks fly as your sword meets the toothed-thing. Your arm shakes and you drop your guard, slipping away and up to kick her in the side.</p><p>
  <em>Tick</em>
</p><p>She spins, her momentum swinging the massive, roaring thing toward you fiercely once more. You roll beneath her and slam the butt of your sword into her lower back. The roaring thing disappears as she falls forward.</p><p>
  <em>Tock</em>
</p><p>She rolls to her feet before you can get ahold of her. She’s unarmed.</p><p>
  <em>Tick</em>
</p><p>You move to swipe your sword across her front, hoping to drive her back—</p><p>
  <em>Tock</em>
</p><p>Your sword slices into Karkat’s middle like a knife through warm butter. Huh. He’s a lot faster than you would have expected.</p><p>Wait. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.</p><p>“Fuck!”</p><p>Everything slows, hangs, stops. Drops of ruby-red blood hang suspended, catching and reflecting the sparse few fingers of sunlight curling over the horizon and through the surrounding leaves. The distorted moment bloats, stretches, vibrates through your skull—the thread is running through your fingers before you can figure out your next step. The moment goes sluggish, larghissimo, then snaps back, and you double over and puke.</p><p>Karkat hits the ground so hard one leg flies up comically, and the other troll is on him immediately, ripping a length of fabric from her middle and winding it around Karkat’s entire torso.  </p><p>You lose the last of your dinner in a great, hacking mess and try to reorient yourself unsuccessfully. The ache from earlier returns, escalates until your fingertips go numb, but a spot on the left side of your neck stings horribly. You overdid it, big time, and now this scary troll lady is going to absolutely immolate your goose.</p><p>Once she stops losing her shit over Karkat, that is. “Why, why, <em>why</em> are you so determined to die?” The voice has lost a little of its earlier nobility, tinged now with panic and frustration. You sit back on your haunches and watch the pair warily, looking the harried newcomer over, trying to determine where she put that godawful, mechanical deathclub.</p><p>In the midst of everything, you still recognize how uncommonly pretty she is. Severely, almost frighteningly so—just like the monsters from Rose’s books, which, with a dreading blossom of realization and an experimental poke at the wound on your neck—ow, god, bad idea—you’re beginning to think might belong in the nonfiction section of your sister’s library.</p><p>Karkat is murmuring something and struggling to keep his eyes open, but he doesn’t look like he’s set to expire immediately, at least. Your stomach rolls again with relief at that, but, wow, you put a tight lid right on that jar of inconvenient feelings. Dude said it himself, he’s going to hang.</p><p>You’re just relieved that <em>you</em> didn’t kill him. You might be (purposefully) in the dark on the details of this whole ordeal, but you do know all hell would break loose if he died before the subjugglator got ahold of him. Gotta get that due process wrapped up first.</p><p>Speaking of which: “Can you like, fix him? We’re five days from Lotaf.”</p><p>Kanaya ignores you. She’s doing something, studying a dainty hand and—yep, she’s licking blood off her fingers. Yeah, okay. You’re going to throw up again.</p><p>She hoists Karkat up easily. He emits a pained grunt. “We are not going to Lotaf, we are going to Dewglass.”</p><p>You stumble over the forest floor, careful not to show her your back, and swipe up your visor before the early sunrise blinds you. “Uh, no, you’re not.” You fumble with the pendant around your neck, and the shackles triple, quadruple in weight, toppling the troll over. Karkat goes over her shoulder and lands hard on his back with a pitiful whine. Whoops.</p><p>Both trolls lie flat on the ground for a few long seconds, breathing heavily. Finally, Kanaya groans.</p><p>“Karkat, darling, please let me kill him. Please?”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>chapter ends in kind of a weird spot but this was getting too. damn. long.<br/>next chap should be soon, thank you again for your support, i love reading all your comments so much! let me know what you think &lt;3</p>
        </blockquote><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Listen I'm gonna level with you right here I do not know if this is a good idea at all so like<br/>if you like this for the love of god let me know cause I wanna continue it but what am I even doing in here? In this fandom?<br/>This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife</p><p>(for real though)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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